"No, scoundrel, I have come to blow out your brains if you refuse to reveal to me what you have done with your sister, doña Dolores!"
[CHAPTER XXI.]
THE PRISONERS.
For some seconds there was a silence, pregnant with menace. The two men were standing face to face. This silence don Melchior de la Cruz was the first to break.
"Ah, ah, ah!" he said, bursting into a hoarse laugh, and sinking again on the border of the hammock, "Was I so wrong in saying to you, my dear sir, that you entered my house for the purpose of assassinating me?"
The adventurer bit his lip savagely, and the unlucky revolver.
"Well, no!" he exclaimed, in a loud voice; "No, I repeat, I will not kill you, for you are not worthy to die by the hand of an honest man; but I will compel you to confess the truth to me."
The young man looked at him with a singular expression. "Try it," he said, with a disdainful shrug of the shoulders.
Then he began carelessly rolling in his fingers a dainty husk cigarette, lit it, and while sending up to the ceiling a puff of blue and perfumed smoke, he said—